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The Jesus Story

Sixteen hundred years ago, a man asked a friend for advice. The man was anxious because he had gained a reputation as a teacher for speaking well, but when students were brought to him for instruction, he became tongue-tied. He was particularly upset because at times in the course of a long narration he found his speaking profitless and distasteful even to himself, and he was worried that his teaching was doing more harm than good. “Help me!” he begged his friend. “Tell me what to say!”

His friend replied: "First and foremost, you need to enjoy what you are talking about." Actually, that is not quite what his friend said. It was somewhat more formal. But the gist was the same. "In reality," the man's friend replied, "we are listened to with much greater satisfaction...when we ourselves also have pleasure in the same work; for the thread of our address is affected by the very joy of which we ourselves are sensible, and it proceeds from us with greater ease and more acceptance."

"More to the point," his friend insisted, "you need to lighten up." Again, I paraphrase. This is what his friend actually wrote:

Now if the cause of our sadness lies in the circumstance that our hearer does not apprehend what we mean, so that we have to come down in a certain fashion from the elevation of our own conceptions, and are under the necessity of dwelling long in the tedious process of syllables which come far beneath the standard of our ideas, and have anxiously to consider how that which we ourselves take in with a most rapid draught of mental apprehension is to be given forth by the mouth of flesh in the long and perplexed intricacies of its method of enunciation; and if the great dissimilarity thus felt (between our utterance and our thought) makes it distasteful to us to speak, and a pleasure to us to keep silence, then let us ponder what has been set before us by Him who has "showed us an example that we should follow in His steps" (1 Peter 2:21).

I know just how Jesus felt. Augustine--for it is Augustine, the great teacher of rhetoric, who is speaking--continues:

For however much our articulate speech may differ from the vivacity of our intelligence, much greater is the difference of the flesh of mortality from the equality of God. And, nevertheless, "although He was in the same form, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant [being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even] death on a cross" (Philippians 2:7-8).

Ivan Kramskoi, "Christ in the Wilderness" (1872)

Sometimes of late, I just want to give up. My colleagues are baying for my blood...okay, not quite...but they aren't happy with me. Friends try to correct my speech, telling me if only I would stop using naughty words, I would find more receptive listeners. Former students tell me that they are dismayed at my description of what it has been like for me being a Christian in the academy. And nobody it seems...okay, I exaggerate, my Facebook friends have been rocks...but nobody outside my Facebook salon seems to want to listen long enough for me to explain what it means to be Christian. They just assume that they know what I think--and condemn me.

It's my own fault, I suppose. I haven't really tried to explain, not lately, at least. It is so hard to know where to begin when everything I think and see is infused with the understanding of what it means to be part of this story, the story of God's descending into the world through the womb of a virgin to take on flesh.

Like Deogratias, Augustine's friend, I flounder, worried lest I bore my listeners or drive them away.

Maybe I should say something about how Christianity isn't about believing a set of propositions, but about God's loving relationship with his creation. Or maybe I could make the historical argument that I draw on in my forthcoming book, about how Christianity developed from the ancient temple tradition, not at odds with, but in fulfillment of what the ancient Hebrews believed about the LORD they celebrated in the psalms. Or maybe...but no, my colleagues could still accuse me of teaching lies.

And, in a way, they would be right. Not that I am lying about being Christian or what Christianity means, but because to them, nothing I can say will sound like anything other than a fairy story.

Because it is.

The greatest fairy story ever told.

J.R.R. Tolkien said it even better than Augustine:

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels--peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: "mythical" in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.... There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation.... [This] story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men--and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.

Conversion, if you will, is an exercise in telling oneself a different story, an exercise in seeing through a different lens, a different account of what it all means. How can I help you see the story that I live through unless you yourself can find yourself inside it?

This is what Deogratias asked Augustine: not for instruction in how to lay out the tenets of the faith as a list of propositions, but for advice on what to say in his narratio, the story that he was trying to tell. The difficulty he was having was a storyteller's difficulty, how to help his listeners realize that the story was about them. Deogratias knew the story, but it came to him in a flash (what Augustine calls a "rapid draught of mental apprehension"): how God loved his creation so much that He entered into it so that He, as Maker, might remake it from within, so that He, as Artist, might repair his own work, which He loved.

It was a story that began many ages ago, when God first made the world and human beings turned away from him. It is a story of great sadness and many defeats, as over and over again God attempted to turn his creatures back to him, only to watch his prophets be shunned and his creatures stray. And yet, He loved his children and wanted them back. So He did an even mightier work, He became a creature himself. Imagine if Tolkien could enter into his own story, be there with Merry and Pippin as they waited at the gate of Isengard for their friends to arrive or with Frodo and Sam as they struggled to find a way down the cliffs of the Emyn Muil. Not just as the author whom we, as readers, know crafted the work, but as a character himself.

And then imagine that the characters realized that they themselves were in a story. A story that went back to the beginning of time, and that somehow was all leading up to the moment in which they found themselves, as it were, stranded and losing hope.

"...I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into?" [asked Sam].

"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."

"No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it--and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got--you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?"

"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later--or sooner."

"No, they never end as tales." One of the things that less sympathetic readers have chided me for over the past few months is my propensity for drawing parallels between Milo and Jesus. (They seem not to have noticed my propensity for comparing myself to the Virgin Mary.) But what other story would Milo, as a Christian, find himself in? The story doesn't care, it just wants to be told. Or, rather, the Story-teller wants us to find ourselves inside this Story, the supreme story of which all other stories are merely counterfeits.

Because stories are important.

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling...stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

This is why history keeps on repeating all the time....

Except, of course, it doesn't. We only think it does because we are so sensitive to stories.

It makes sense to me that it is my colleagues in historyand medieval studies who have felt most angered by my writing about Milo. I challenged them to see him through a different lens, read him as part of a story other than that by which they have tended to order their understanding as scholars. Like the scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus challenged, they know the way we are supposed to read the evidence of history. They know what patterns to look for and how to read the signs. They know that there is no such thing as a Story-teller, only human tellers of stories. They know that the Story behind it all is one of struggle and survival of the fittest. They know that truth lies only in the way in which they interpret the evidence at hand.

Which puts them at terrible risk. What if the story they have been telling is wrong?
They don't see it that way, almost no one in academia does. It is why it is so hard to describe the experience of faith to those habituated to a different story-line. It is not about having access to more or better facts, but about ordering those facts according to a different narrative, a narrative in which the very same facts take on radically different meanings.

What does it mean to have faith? For my own part, faith is a habit of thinking analogically, through stories. Rather, through a particular Story that carries the truth of all stories. It is not about proving something scientifically, as it were, but about seeing the patterns by which we, as creatures, live out our lives as artists made in the image and likeness of a Maker, who loves us and desires nothing except our love in return.

Within this Story, our actions take on certain meanings that they would not, could not otherwise. But it is also a Story in which we, as creatures, are called upon ourselves to create, whether biologically, as parents, or aesthetically, as artists, thus the great mysteries (as Tolkien constantly emphasized in his stories) of marriage and art. The one thing that this Story forbids--the great sin of this Story--is the desire to dominate other people's will, to force them either to believe or to act in any particular way. Such is Evil, and thus, again in Tolkien's story, the power of the One Ring: to dominate and rule.

"My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus told Pilate (John 18:36). I did not come to rule. "[But] taking the form of a servant...he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross." Christ is the lens through which Christians read history; Christ is the model in whom Christians are called to recognize themselves. To be Christian means to find oneself in the same story as Christ. The Story in which God so loved the world that he entered into it in order to give his children eternal life (John 3:16).

Do you really expect me tell this Story with anything other than the utmost joy?

I am finding it difficult to stay cheerful of late. I could blame the hot flashes, which have been wearing me down for the past several months, but it isn’t just the hot flashes.

It is the whole wretched culture war that—human nature being what it is—we are never going to win.

It is the relentless pressure in academia to conform to the prevailing narrative of victimization and oppression that would cast one group as demons (white males, especially Christians) and the other as innocent (everyone else).

It is the unwillingness on the part of establishment conservatives to credit what Milo has shown are the stakes in our fight against the death of our Western ideals.

It is the feeling of being muffled and silenced for speaking out against the mischaracterization of my own field of medieval studies as riven with white supremacism and neglect of the Other.

It is the disappointment in not being able to do more to make a difference in the way in which the argument goes.

I know from the Facebook groups I belong to that many of his followers take Jordan as a kind of spiritual advisor, some would say guru. They spend thread after thread discussing how to live out his sayings.

Which would be fine.

If not for the fact that some of his sayings go directly contrary to the tradition in which he purports to be speaking.

I know, I fell for it, too. In Jordan’s powerful words:
Don’t underestimate the power of your speech! Now, Western culture is phallogocentric. Let’s say it... It is predicated on the idea of the Logos. The Logos is the sacred element of Western culture. What do…

The tenor is smug self-righteousness, the absolute certainty of being on the Right Side of History. Even some liberals are starting to find it a bit hard to take, the way in which their family and friends talk about Those People. The Deplorables. The Racists. The Misogynists. The Xenophobes. The People With the Wrong Opinions about Immigration, the Relation Between the Sexes, the Welfare State, and Islam. You know. The ones who read Breitbart, vote for Donald Trump, and listen to Milo.

It can get a bit wearing, even at a distance. It takes real stamina to be able to meet it head on, as Milo has done this past semester over the course of his Dangerous Faggot Tour. Quite frankly, I don't know how he does it. I get weary just watchingthe protests. The name-calling. The unwillingness to listen to what he actually says. On the other hand, the tactics rarely change, which makes them possible to list. And if we can list them, we can prepare for them. These are the weapons that our oppone…

Feminism is cancer because it is built on a lie. Actually, it is built on a whole pyramid of lies, but there is one gigantic one at its base.

Here it is in its most diabolical form. The author is Ludwig Feuerbach, his translator the novelist George Eliot, the work his Essence of Christianity, published in English in 1854:
But here it is also essential to observe, and this phenomenon is an extremely remarkable one, characterising the very core of religion, that in proportion as the divine subject is in reality human, the greater is the apparent difference between God and man; that is, the more, by reflection on religion, by theology, is the identity of the divine and human denied, and the human, considered as such, is depreciated.... To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing....
The monks made a vow of chastity to God; they mortified the sexual passion in themselves, but therefore they had in heaven, in the Virgin Mary, the image of woman—an image of…

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“You grasp my soul, and topple my enemies with it. And what is our soul? A splendid weapon it may be, long, sharp, oiled, and coruscating with the light of wisdom as it is brandished. But what is this soul of ours worth, what is it capable of, unless God holds it and fights with it? Any sword, however beautifully made, lies idle if there is no warrior to take it up.... So God does whatever he wishes with our soul. Since it is in his hand, it is his to use as he will." -- Augustine of Hippo, Exposition of Psalm 34 (35),trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B.

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“The best way to pray is: stop. Let prayer pray within you whether you know it or not. This means a deep awareness of your true inner identity.... By grace we are Christ. Our relationship with God is that of Christ to the Father in the Holy Spirit." -- Father Louis, alias Thomas Merton